The use of high-brightness LEDs in lighting applications is growing rapidly as a result of inherent benefits to LED technology, such as long lifetimes, good efficiency, and use of non-toxic materials. LED lighting solutions, however, still need to offer better performance at better value. Because LEDs prefer to be driven in a more sophisticated fashion as compared to traditional incandescent bulbs, performance is heavily dependent on the LED driver circuit.
Traditional LED driver ICs (integrated circuits) suffer in performance and supported features in several ways. First, the driver efficiency generally falls well short of the desired targets. Similarly, the power factor for existing solutions can be quite poor, especially while in a dimming configuration. Finally, when using the triac-based wall dimmers that are typical in existing installations, conventional solutions may cause annoying flicker while dimming, and are often bulky and unreliable.
When trying to address these concerns, existing solutions can grow substantially in solution complexity, size, and cost, thereby limiting the adoption of such approaches.
The present invention addresses and solves these and other concerns.